And life will never be the same

Venue: Ster Kinekor, Maerua Mall
Film: THE WORLD TRADE CENTER
Director: Oliver Stone
Music: Craig Armstrong
Writing Credits: Andrea Berloff
Players: Nicolas Cage, Michael Peña, Jay Hernandez, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Michael Shannon
Genre: True life drama
Rating: *****
By Gerry Hill

A day can start much like any other, as did 11 September 2001. Port Authority policeman, John McCloughlin, responded to his alarm clock, checked on his children in their beds, and trudged through the pre-dawn, as was his custom. So did Will Jameno (Michael Peña). This film is their story - of a day which changed the world and changed their lives – forever. Stone starts this film in an understated way with a wonderful montage of breaking-day images of New York: a quiet river, over-arched by the mechanical ‘busy-ness’ on bridges; early morning commuters huddled on the underground; early dawn sunlight challenging the aggression of neon and angry electricity; the power and majesty of skyscrapers touched by God’s gold at dawn. Slowly, empty, steely streets are peopled more and more and “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie…All bright and glittering in the smokeless air. “With apologies to William Wordsworth, Stone shows “the mighty heart” of New York, gearing up for the beat and rhythm of a day of human industriousness.

For the police at their morning briefing, the prime objective is to locate Zoe Cowley, a runaway from Rhode Island. The final advice from their chief, a daily directive, is “As always, protect yourselves; and watch your backs.” The attack upon the Trade Centre Twin Towers is cleverly handed as ‘an inside job’: Stone’s camera angles and directorial perspective are that of ‘the man in the street’ and the ‘ordinary cop on the beat’. There is no ubiquitous and omniscient narrator: we learn and deduce bit by bit, through rumour, report, and guesswork, much as every New Yorker did, at the time. The camera work is understated with a high angle shot of the twin towers: two obelisks in the ebony of shadow and a hint of harm in the fleeting image of the shadow of a plane which flits momentarily across the mirrored surface of a skyscraper. “What schmuck would drive a plane into the World Trade Centre?” asks a policeman, as McLoughlin, Jameno, and their cohorts are herded to the scene in a sequestrated bus. The men speculate in monosyllables about ignorance or incompetence, but the idea of terrorism does not occur. The camera catches images of the slow motion panning of bus windows, with every policeman’s face craned at the same angle, showing a uniform, awestruck expression of disbelief at the horrendous spectacle for speculation. Director Stone vacillates between the comparatively normal behaviour of commuters in downtown New York with the immediate ‘crime scene’: a blizzard of paper rains down with a misleading gentleness. The evacuation of Tower 1 seems almost pedestrian and orderly. There is surprisingly little noise – yet.

When Sergeant McCloughlin asks for volunteers to help with evacuation, there is a momentary pause of hesitation in the group before the courageous or foolhardy come forward. The rest melt away. Blood and gore is used sparingly: obvious only to those who become intimate with the concourse of The Trade Centre itself. The police story is simple: before they offer concrete assistance, in fact, with their trolley of survival technology at the ready, the police have no time before the ‘world’ ends in a growl of straining steel girders and a deluge of concrete blocks, burying them 20’ or more in rubble and ignorance. As McCloughlin and Jimeno are trapped and partly crushed, the camera retreats, slowly but surely, to provide aerial views of the scene and, finally, satellite perspective, as the news of the disaster is steadfastly beamed to the entire world. From this point, the story diverges: the desperate struggle to survive, mentally and physically, in a confined world of concrete debris and twisted girders is the policemen’s story; the uncertainty of their families and loved ones is another; yet a third involves the heroism of ordinary Americans who pack their bags, leave their homes all over the country - to come to help.

Actual news snippets pepper the story, such as Bush’s TV speech in which he claimed that “the resolve of a great Nation is being tested.” However, there is not as much documentary material as one might expect, given Stone’s technique in previous films. “You guys don’t know it, but this country is at war,” intones an incidental character at one point: McCloughlin and Jimeno might think that, as they battle electrical short-circuiting and plummeting fireballs from above. They are but 2 of the 400 of “New York’s finest” who chose the path of destiny which led inside the Twin Towers to save others. “What good did we do?” asks Mc Cloughlin gloomily at a low point in his entombment. Jimeno answers him: “They (the police) couldn’t have lived with themselves if they hadn’t gone in. That’s who they are.” It is not easy to sustain the fragmented plotline thereafter, as heroic rescuers such as Dave Karnes (Michael Shannon) toil up and down a wasteland of rock and rubble, calling for survivors. There are many scenes of the 2 policemen, counselling each other into consciousness, their faces like cement-chalk death masks in the hell of their confinement. “Where are we?” asks one; “in Hell – alive in Hell,’ responds the other. Stone uses flashbacks, in which love of family reigns supreme as a survival technique: both men fantasise about special moments, and love, and the mundaneness of togetherness. They think about birth, not death.

“It’s like God made us a curtain of smoke, shielding us from what we are not yet ready to see,” says a character involved in the rescue. Jimeno begs for his leg to be amputated - anything to escape the concrete confinement. Eventually, he is lifted aloft into the ether, an open sky beckons beyond, and a human chain of well-wishers moves his stretcher down through the rubble to the ground. McCloughlin worries about finishing his carpentry work in his kitchen, undertaken to please his wife; Jimeno concedes his favourite name for his unborn child in favour of his wife’s choice. They focus on little things, but family is the focus and salvation. “You kept me alive,” says John McCloughlin, as his wife runs alongside his stretcher into the operating theatre. After 13 and 27 surgical operations respectively, the 2 men survive into a changed world.

A final montage of early morning next day proves a stark contrast to the beginning: empty trains; streets choked by paper and cement dust; smoke drifting listlessly across the efforts of the sun. Men are still busy, though: a bulldozer already strains to push debris purposefully aside; rescue workers cue up for hotdogs; the ‘Wall of Hope’, with photographs of the missing, is already operative. Stone gives us the facts and figures: 2 749 people perished; 343 New York policemen ‘went in’; there were only 20 survivors found and McCloughlin and Jimeno were numbers 18 and 19. Two years later, McCloughlin comments in a voiceover that this day “brought out goodness we forget could exist: people taking care of each other.” The tagline puts it differently: “The World saw Evil that Day: two men saw something else.”